T.X. Watson's Pre-EVENT blog

It was a weird, scary experience, watching the livestream of the NASA control room while Curiosity attempted to land. They were reassuring. Pretty much every new development, they said "Which is what we expected," or "Which is normal," which managed to mitigate the tension pretty successfully.
Still, it's scary to watch like a hundred scientists -- some of the smartest people in the country -- sitting in a control room, relaying information that's almost ten minutes old, and knowing that, no matter what happens, there's nothing they could do.

I don't think there are very many times in human lives when you get moment-by-moment information about something happening, that's already happened. It screws with my perception of causality. Even moreso, this time, because it was the same seven minutes late for everyone. And it was on Twitter.

I imagine I'll be gathering my thoughts about this over the next several days, weeks, maybe years -- it could be a very long time before we have any clue how important this day really is.